Dining Room

I know it’s been a while, but there’s lots going on here, including a new baby on the way and a big extension being added to the side of our house (as advertised on Facebook…). One thing that’s been left undocumented is that we’ve had a bit of an issue in our dining room.

I realized that I never really did a post about what I did in there, and it was by far my greatest house accomplishment to date.

The dining room is by far and away the biggest room in the house (at the moment), and was used as the living room by the previous tenants. This picture actually makes it look decent, but it was a dark, dank hole, so don’t be swayed…

Here it is after we stripped all of the wallpaper and pulled up the two layers of carpet.

And after painting the walls and laying the floor. Lovely.

Anyway, this room was used as storage space for us for quite some time before I actually had things unpacked/stored in the garage. I had always planned on doing some sort of banquette seating in here so we could have a bit of extra hidden storage for little things that we don’t really need to see/use every day.

I made literally the most basic bench seats ever out of some stud work timber and plasterboard (aka 2×4’s and sheetrock) that I had leftover from other projects.

Then I ran out of timber…

I did manage to get some more delivered though, and made some simple cushions out of some MDF, foam core, batting and fabric I bought off from Amazon.

Tah-dah!!

Not the prettiest bench ever, but it got Ellis’ seal of approval.

It’s hard to tell, but I also put up some wallpaper that looked like wainscotting, in the dining space to separate it from the rest of the room.

Probably the best part is that we scored this awesome dining set from a local charity shop for only £125.

It was SUPER 70’s looking, but really sturdy and exactly the right size for the space, so I spruced up the table by staining the top and painting the base, and the chairs got a new turquoise makeover with some funky, geometric fabric and new cushions.

And I bought a reproduction Eames armchair for the end, which Ellis has claimed as his own.

This really was a lovely little dining area for a while, and then our neighbors had a huge leak that caused dry rot in their floors and walls. Luckily we don’t have any wood in our walls, but that didn’t stop water from coming through and this is what we discovered:

MOLD!!! Arghh!! So I had to rip out the whole thing that I had built a year ago. Boo…

I had the major sads for a couple of days, but then I realized that I could start all over and do something new with the space. I really loved that bench seat, and it came in really handy for special occasions, but we’ll live.

Luckily it looks pretty minor, and we have no dry rot in our place, or leak, and the leak next door has been remedied, so that’s good news for us.

I’m getting a little twitchy waiting for construction to be completed so I can get to work on this little corner of the house. Mostly cleaning it up and repainting. I’ll worry about the other stuff later. Painting while 8 1/2 months pregnant will be a breeze, right?